THE NOVEL OF MEMORY AS WORLD GENRE. EXPLORING THE ROMANIAN CASE

Abstract

In the last four decades, the novel of memory has gained momentum on the world scene, taking advantage of the collapse of colonial and/or dictatorial regimes around the globe. Romania was not an exception, so after the fall of Communism in 1989, and more prominently at the beginning of the new millennium, this subgenre blossomed. Based on quantitative and qualitative research of a selection of fifty novels published in the Romanian space both before and after the fall of the communist regime, this article is the first attempt to map the Romanian novel of memory from a genre-based perspective. Our approach follows the evolution of the novel of memory in the course of four decades, from a thematic, formal, and generational perspective. Relying on these operators, as well as on the culturalist approach to literature in memory studies, we distinguish between a traumatic, a (n)ostalgic and an agonistic novel of memory.

Full text

DACOROMANIA LITTERARIA, VII, 2020, pp. 97–115
ANDREEA MIRONESCU
DORIS MIRONESCU
1
THE NOVEL OF MEMORY AS WORLD GENRE.
EXPLORING THE ROMANIAN CASE
The novel of memory is a subgenre with an impressive spatial and cultural
range: it manifested itself in numerous countries in all parts of the world, and it
emerged only some four decades ago. However, its existence remains troubling in
many respects: it was theorized in the academia before being canonized in the
national literary histories. Moreover, it thrived in the discourse of recent cultural
studies, rather than in that of literary studies. While the phrase became
commonplace in some countries such as post-Francoist Spain, where academics
embraced it and numerous writers illustrated it, the novel of memory does not seem
to spread from one country to another. One may speak of polygenesis, noticing
how the subgenre flourishes in different countries simultaneously, indebted to a
similar or related political and historical climate maybe, but not really to a decisive,
towering literary influence. That is because the novel of memory springs from a
concern with political identity, not with form, so it is not essentially influenced by
mimetic aspirations to replicate international commercial success, but instead it is
fuelled by national and local stakes and conditions. Still, this doesn’t mean that the
novel of memory is destined to remain a mere local phenomenon, or a branch of
some local phenomena, uninteresting from the viewpoint of a systematic research
of world literature or quantitative analysis on a global scale.
In this article, we set out to delineate the general traits of the subgenre in order
to propose a definition that we will then use to speak of the Romanian novel of
memory in the last four decades and to highlight its transformation from a
subversive memory novel during the communist regime, to a traumatic, (n)ostalgic
and, ultimately, agonistic memory novel in post-communism.
The Challenges of a World Genre
The novel of memory should first be acknowledged as a world genre simply
because of its size. Examples of novels of memory may be found in Spain, Great
Britain, Germany, Romania, the U.S.A., India, Rwanda, Argentina, Chile,
Uruguay, and so on. It is true that the label was first coined in the 1990s for
Spanish post-Franco era novels that dealt with trauma and the polyphony of
1
Doris Mironescu acknowledges that this paper was supported by the project funded by the Ministry
of Research and Innovation within Program 1 – Development of the national RD system, Subprogram
1.2 – Institutional Performance – RDI excellence funding projects, Contract no. 34PFE/19.10.2018.

ANDREEA MIRONESCU, DORIS MIRONESCU
98
historical narratives, but it is fully compatible and should also include other “local”
sub-subgenres that otherwise fail to embrace their truly global reach. Post-
dictatorship novels emerging in Eastern Europe after 1989 and in Argentina after
1983, post-genocide novels such as those written in the wake of the Rwandan Civil
War of 1994, or neo-slave narratives and Native American Renaissance novels of
the 1980s in the U.S.A. make up some of the national canons which should, in our
opinion, be regarded as part of the same world genre. From Spain’s Luis Goytisolo
and Carmen Martín Gaite to Argentina’s Laura Alcoba, and from the Americans
Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko or Sherman Alexie to the British/ Indian
Salman Rushdie, Germany’s Thomas Brussig, Romania’s Gabriela Adameșteanu
and Norman Manea, including the Rwandan Gilbert Gatore, the novel of memory
flourished starting from the late 1970s, with an understandable delay in the
Argentinian case (the 1990s) and in Eastern Europe (after the fall of dictatorships)
and even later in Rwanda (in the wake of the 1994 genocide). It heralds the advent
of an age of ethically-driven return to history, of processing collective trauma and
turning literature into a venue for debunking historical mythologies. It is not a
coincidence that this happened after several of the world’s most cruel dictatorships
(Francisco Franco’s in Spain, the military junta’s in 1970s–1980s Argentina,
Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile) crumbled and after the chain system of socialist
dictatorships in Eastern Europe broke down, prompting commentators to speak of a
necessary coinage for a new cultural paradigm, cemented by ulterior technological
progress, economic world crisis, political convergences and even pandemics
2
.
The atomization of the numerous “national” brands of novels of memory
should not make one overlook the fact that they have emerged rather recently, in a
multiply connected world and, above all, at a time when world literature has
become an institution, not just a political metaphor. Local novels of memory are
being absorbed into a world genre not only by the similarity of the conditions of
their appearance, but also by their shared international readership. By being read in
multiple cultural spaces simultaneously, novels of memory are being
metaphorically relocated, and their initial belonging to a particular novelistic sub-
subgenre is renegotiated in view of the relatability of the trauma narrated.
For instance, several Romanian novels, among which Varujan Vosganian’s
2009 Cartea șoaptelor [The Book of Whispers] and Norman Manea’s 2012 Vizuina
[The Lair] (2012), singled out by Romanian critics for their inspection of the
experience of Romanian communism, were advertised in their English translations
as novels of genocide and, respectively, post-9/11 novels, highlighting the
mutability of genre in the age of world literature. It also goes to show that,
sometimes, a subgenre is a matter of perception and that “local” sub-subgenres
such as the novel of Romanian communism, American neo-slave narratives and the
2
Christian Moraru, Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural
Imaginary, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2011, p. 3.

THE NOVEL OF MEMORY AS WORLD GENRE
99
novel of genocide may very well function as parts of the same world literary genre.
Indeed, the novel of memory may be described, following Mariano Siskind, as a
“new generic formation”, a “constellation [...] of texts whose identity is defined in
accordance with new needs and new critical and aesthetic desires translated into
new organizing principles”
3
. The very fact that the subgenre was put together after
the fact, by academics who ventured to group novels based on their shared concern
with processing the recent past in a traumatized collective memory, is therefore not
a shortcoming, but rather a consequence of their belonging to the age of world
literature, of transnational literary institutions and of social activism in the
academia.
Another difficulty in discussing the novel of memory from a genre-based
perspective concerns the way in which Cultural Studies relate to the very concept
of genre and its functions. The culturalist approach challenges the traditional
aesthetic perspective which sees literature as falling into clear-cut categories
defined by formal constraints and thematic lineages which are in turn subverted by
the exceptional creativity of artists who, instead of breaking the generic mold, only
enhance its canonical power for the generations to come. On the contrary, for
cultural studies scholars, genre is to be defined and used “to examine dynamic
relations between literary texts and historically situated social practices and
structures”
4
, which means that (in)fidelity toward a convened set of aesthetic traits
is not essential. The situation is made probably clearer by the very existence of a
complex, hybrid subgenre such as the novel of memory. A culturalist approach is
very appropriate for this subgenre which engages sensitive matters having to do
with collective remembrance and reckoning, and has real consequences in actual
policies of memory promoted and enacted in a social landscape at least partly
shaped by the canonizing force of literature. Bawarshi makes it clear that culturalist
approaches to genre work by “examining how genres reflect and participate in
legitimizing social practices and recognizing how generic distinctions maintain
hierarchies of power, value and culture”
5
.
The emergence of the memory novel in the aftermath of slavery, colonialism,
dictatorship or genocide, through an intricate political, cultural and literary process
not only demonstrates that this (sub)genre was selected at the expense of others,
but also proves the utility of a genre-based approach to ethnic, national or
collective memory.
3
Mariano Siskind, “The Genres of World Literature: The Case of Magical Realism”, in Theo D’haen,
David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir (eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature, Oxon,
Routledge, 2012, p. 347.
4
Anis S. Bawarshi, Mary Jo Reiff, Genre. An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and
Pedagogy, Indiana, Parlor Press, 2010, p. 24.
5
Ibidem, p. 25.

ANDREEA MIRONESCU, DORIS MIRONESCU
100
Defining the Novel of Memory: the Spanish Context
Surprisingly enough, although the phrase “novel of memory” was used at least
once in world literary scholarship in reference to the authors mentioned in the
previous chapter and to many others, there are very little attempts to pinpoint this
subgenre conceptually, in a more precise manner. This is because the phrase was
initially launched by Salman Rushdie, who used it to explain his own novel
Midnight’s Children in a famous 1982 essay, “Imaginary Homelands”, and then
entered the postcolonial Anglophone critical mainstream in reference to other
authors
6
. Besides the conceptual elusiveness, the essential challenge is to identify
the formal characteristics of this subgenre while acknowledging its spatial
dispersion and lack of direct connectivity between national chapters. Following
Franco Moretti, the crux of genre is plot, and the textual devices that serve the plot
best make up the standard version of it
7
. But memory cannot constitute a plot by
itself, although Marcel Proust’s “mémoire involontaire” functions as a generative
textual device not only in his multi-volume masterpiece In Search of Lost Time
(1913–1927), but also, as Samuel O’Donoghue argues, in the novels of several
Spanish authors from the (post-)Franco era
8
.
To further define the subgenre of the memory novel, we will first rely on the
distinctions made by its main theorist, David K. Herzberger, who wrote about
Spanish post-Franco literature in 1991, and then extrapolate from there. Novels of
memory are, he says, “in the largest sense, those fictions that evoke past time
through subjective remembering, most often through first person narration”,
immediately adding that the past he refers to, the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)
and Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975), is a timeframe that was
“eschewed and appropriated by Francoist historiography”
9
. As a result, we have to
consider this subgenre as related to the political and the historical novel, but
differing from each, first by its subjectivity or the personal implication of the
narrative voice(s) as compared to the relative detachment of the narrator in the
political novel, and secondly, by the challenge brought to the mono-tonality of the
historical novel by the polyphony of individual voices engaging in dialogue with
each other and (in effect) with History.
The features of the subgenre in Herzberger are explored while drawing a
distinction between two types of novels dealing with memory. The early memory
6
Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands”, London Review of Books, 1982, 18,
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n18/salman-rushdie/imaginary-homelands. Accessed September
1, 2020.
7
Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature”, Modern Language Quarterly, 61, 2002, 1,
pp. 207-227.
8
Samuel O’Donoghue, Rewriting Franco’s Spain: Marcel Proust and the Dissident Novelists of
Memory, London, Bucknell University Press, 2018, p. xiv.
9
David K. Herzberger, “Narrating the Past: History and the Novel of Memory in Postwar Spain”,
PMLA, 106, 1991, 1, p. 35.

THE NOVEL OF MEMORY AS WORLD GENRE
101
narrations, written from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, belong to novelists he
calls “social realists”, authors dealing with censorship and the obligation to
conform to state orthodoxy. They respond to the “mythical mode” of official
Francoist historiography by portraying, in an experiential and mock-heroic mode,
“a specific present that suggests a specific past [...] necessarily divergent from the
one trumpeted by the official historiography of the state”
10
. On the contrary, the
next generation of memory writers, the novelists coming up in the latter half of the
1960s and onwards, bring along a temporal awareness largely absent from the
social realists’ reconstructions of the past. For these authors, “to know the
historical is to mediate and to narrate it with the voice of a subject in the present,
who is also positioned within history”
11
. The distinct and oppositional elaboration
of the notions of self and state, or of memory and history in the novels of the social
realists is replaced, in the 1970s novels of memory, by “the individual self (most
frequently, but not exclusively, through first-person narration) seeking definition
by commingling the past and present in the process of remembering [...], either
voluntarily or involuntarily”, thus prompting a “bimodal correlation: the self in
search of definition; the definition of self-perceived always within the flow of
history”
12
. These definitions lead up to considerations regarding technique.
Herzberger mentions a subjectivity that may or may not involve first-person
narrative, an ambiguity regarding the narrative voice (“indeterminate essence of the
subjective”), a superpositioning of the individual and the collective self (since
“history shapes and is shaped by the private affairs of the self”
13
), fragmented
composition, sometimes temporal uncertainty (“teleogenic plot”), polyphony and
dialogism (“dialectical propositions” regarding history), and embracing the text’s
hybridity as a means to enhancing its authenticity.
But what is more important is the great relevance Herzberger attributes to form
in the novel of memory. For him, what makes novel-form remembrance an actual
novel of memory is the acceptance of the co-presence of multiple discourses on
memory both in society and in the individual self, the result being a predilection
toward elaborate form and metanarrative: “the novel of memory reveals (and
asserts) the determinants of its own form, and thus lays bare the contingencies of
narration as a way of knowing the past”
14
. While this definition might seem
somewhat tributary to the 1990s vogue of postmodernism, Herzberger’s insistence
on awareness with respect to the consequences of choosing one voice or another,
one montage technique or another, hints at a dominant concern with the ethics of
narration which will shape the subgenre in the following years. This far-reaching
insight will make possible, in the coming decades, the inclusion of new concepts
10
David K. Herzberger, Narrating the Past, p. 36.
11
Ibidem, p. 37.
12
Ibidem, p. 37.
13
Ibidem, p. 38.
14
Ibidem, p. 37.

ANDREEA MIRONESCU, DORIS MIRONESCU
102
and theory frames in the discussion of memory novels, such as trauma, affiliative
memory and agonism
15
.
Another Spanish critic, Gonzalo Sobejano, refers to the drive to write
narratives of remembering after the death of Franco as “a will to distance oneself
from those events”
16
, echoing the complex psychological mechanisms involved in
these literary choices: “Once completed, the past called for a kind of recapitulation,
a view from a new vantage point, a view long desired and so patiently awaited”
17
.
Sobejano also highlights the dialogic aspect of many Spanish novels from the
1970s up to the 2000s, detailing the ingenious narrative frames used by authors
such as José-María Vaz de Soto, Carmen Martín Gaite or Luis Goytisolo to suggest
inner debate, “phantasmagoric identities” or even “phantom-like interlocutors”.
Later still, Sarah Leggott and Ross Woods invoke Cathy Caruth’s reworking of
Freud’s theory of cultural traumata by discussing (quite generously, in our opinion)
novels of memory from the whole postwar period in Spain
18
. More recently, Hans
Lauge Hansen quotes Marianne Hirsh’s concepts of post-memory and affiliative
memory to refer to the most recent developments of the subgenre after 2000, in the
memory novels of a new generation of Spanish authors such as Benjamin Prado,
who now contribute to
…a typical subgenre of post-memory or inter-generational memory, characterized
by a strong hybridization of genres in an artistically elaborated discourse that blurs the
distinctions between essay, biography and/ or autobiography, historiographical
discourse, journalism, and novelistic fiction, and in which docu-fiction, auto-fiction
and meta-fictional comments are combined
19
.
These novels of post-memory focus not so much on the processes of individual
remembering (as the already canonical novels of memory did), but instead “depict
the social processes that contribute to the construction of cultural memory”
20
. So,
what at one point was primarily a novel of trauma and self-investigation seems to
turn, in the most recent examples of Spanish novels of memory, into analytical
metanarratives, playing with nostalgia rather than pursuing traumatic closure, and
reaching out to other places filled with memory for a confrontation of the
mechanisms of community-building.
15
See Hans Lauge Hansen, “Modes of Remembering in the Contemporary Spanish Novel”, Orbis
Litterarum, 71, 2016, 4, pp. 265-288.
16
Gonzalo Sobejano, “The Testimonial Novel and the Novel of Memory”, in Harriet Turner,
Adelaida López de Martínez, The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 185.
17
Ibidem, p. 191.
18
Sarah Leggott and Ross Woods, Memory and Trauma in the Postwar Spanish Novel: Revisiting the
Past, London, Bucknell University Press, 2013, p. 5.
19
Hans Lauge Hansen, Testimony, Documentary, Fiction: The remediation of Stolen Children, in
Lars Saetre, Patrizia Lombardo, Sara Tanderup Linkis (eds.), Exploring Text, Media and Memory,
Aarhus, Aarhus University Press, 2017, p. 318.
20
Ibidem.

THE NOVEL OF MEMORY AS WORLD GENRE
103
The Romanian Chapter
We have analyzed in greater detail the Spanish critical theory on the novel of
memory because it presents one of the most complex perspectives on the subject
matter and it can therefore offer an analogy which may help us plausibly
reconstruct the Romanian case. In general, critics speak of a Romanian “novel of
memory” when discussing novels that appeared in post-communism. Indeed, after
1989, the concern with collective identity after the fall of communism, the need to
process past trauma and an unrealistic trust in the clarifying and healing force of
literature fueled expectations for the emergence of a vindicating and monumental
“novel of communism”. The critic Dan C. Mihăilescu was only half-jokingly
decrying the absence still, in the 2000s, of a “Great Novel of Our Suffering under
Ceausescu”
21
, and his anxiety foreshadowed the drive to memory felt by many
actors in the literary field, readers and writers alike. In a similar manner, another
established critic, Nicolae Manolescu, complained that the 2000 generation of
writers was “presentist [...], selfish, self-centered, sensuous, superficial”
22
,
uninterested in the past and therefore endangering the continuity of literature’s
mandate to embody the “historical conscience” of the nation. Indirectly answering
this plight, Sanda Cordoș focused on the prose published after 2000, discerning two
distinct waves: one constituted by “artists of memory” who write “novels of
identity”, the other by writers positioned “against memory”. While the first are
concerned with the phenomenon of leaving one world and entering another, namely
from dictatorship to post-communism, the others move away from these crucial
obsessions and propose new themes, polemical toward the former
23
. Finally,
Claudiu Turcuș also writes about novels of memory that he locates primarily in
post-communism, although novels of memory are to be found, in his opinion, also
before 1989
24
; his criteria for identifying such novels are, however, imprecise
25
.
But the novel of memory in Romania is not only a post-communist
phenomenon. Keeping in mind the timeline of the Spanish novelization of memory,
21
Dan C. Mihăilescu, Literatura română în postceaușism [Romanian Literature after Ceaușescuʼs
Regime], vol. II, Iași, Polirom, 2006, p. 147.
22
Nicolae Manolescu, Istoria critică a literaturii române. 5 secole de literatură [The Critical History
of Romanian Literature. 5 Centuries of Literature], Pitești, Paralela 45, 2008, p. 1451.
23
Sanda Cordoș, Lumi din cuvinte. Reprezentări și identități în literatura română postbelică [Worlds
Made of Words. Representations and Identities in Postwar Romanian Literature], București, Cartea
Românească, 2012, p. 132.
24
Claudiu Turcuș, Împotriva memoriei. De la estetismul socialist la noul cinema românesc [Against
Memory. From Socialist Aestheticism to the New Romanian Cinema], București, Eikon, 2017, p. 45.
25
See also Andreea Mironescu, “Konfigurationen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses im postkommunistischen
rumänischen Roman”, in Michèle Mattusch (ed.), Kulturelles Gedächtnis–Ästhetisches Erinnern: Literatur,
Film und Kunst in Rumänien, Berlin, Frank & Timme, 2018, pp. 251-275.

ANDREEA MIRONESCU, DORIS MIRONESCU
104
we maintain that memory was one of the main concerns of Romanian authors also
during communism, beginning with the end of the 1960s.
In discussing the novel of memory before and after the fall of communism, we
first surveyed the novels indexed under the category “novel of memory”, “memory
novel”, “novel of affective memory”, “autobiographical novel” and other related
critical formulas in the two volumes of the Dicționarul cronologic al romanului
românesc [Contemporary Dictionary of the Romanian Novel], 1844–1989 (DCRR)
and 1990–2000 (DCRR 1990–2000), respectively. A second step was to
discriminate between proper novels of memory (following the conceptualization of
this subgenre in the literature on the Spanish case) and different instances of
political, psychological or sentimental novels that dealt marginally with the
problematic of memory. A third essential step was to complete the list of memory
novels for the interval 2001–2020, which is uncharted by the lexicographical
instruments available at present for Romanian literature
26
. For this reason, we had to
work with a list of titles released by the main publishers of the period, selecting
those books which enjoyed critical success and multiple editions, received
extensive reviews, gained literary prizes and nominations. With these limitations,
the 50 novels presented in the following sections (5 from late communism and 45
from post-communism), constitute a “canonical list”
27
, insomuch as it is made up
of books selected by the market and by other canonical instruments. The criteria
used to delimit them were both thematic – i.e. memory is a key theme, and the
concern with collective identity has to be present – and formal, since memory
novels are so tightly connected with ambiguity of voice, fragmented composition,
temporal uncertainty, polyphony, subjectivity, dialogism and hybridity. Given that
the subgenre is active and sprawling as we write, it is understandable why we could
not provide a more detailed quantitative research on it.
The Novel of Memory under the Communist Regime
For the purpose of this discussion, one should note that Romanian communism
is not a culturally and politically homogeneous period. There are times of pressure
and times of detente, rough beginnings (the first communist government in 1945;
the proclamation of the Republic and the ousting of king Michael I in 1947; the
political repression of the 1950s), moments of apparent “thaw” that quickly return
to freezing again (1953; 1956; 1958), and long decades of self-congratulatory
dominance over any form of dissidence (1965–1989, the Nicolae Ceaușescu years).
Also, the dynamics of the literary field is ever changing, with the literati first
competing politically for positions of institutional authority, and later weaponizing
26
Still, attempts to gather exhaustive data for this timeframe are in progress. See Andrei Terian, “Big
Numbers. A Quantitative Analysis of the Development of the Novel in Romania”, Transylvanian
Review, 28, 2019, 1, pp. 55-71.
27
With a few exceptions located mainly in the traumatic memory novel category.

THE NOVEL OF MEMORY AS WORLD GENRE
105
aesthetic performance in the service of either political immunity or active
opposition. While in Spain a first wave of memory novels manifests itself at the
beginning of the 1960s with the generation of the so-called social realists, we can
speak of such a wave in Romania toward the end of the next decade. Taking
advantage of the cultural liberalization brought about in 1965 by the change of
guard at the helm of the Communist Party
28
, many writers turned to what began to
be called, euphemistically, “novels of the obsessive decade”
29
. The novel of the
“obsessive decade” was a local version of the political novel that helped exorcise
the demons of early communism without in any way stirring its current demons. It
dealt with the half-acknowledged political crimes perpetrated after the war and in
the 1950s by the communist chiefs in their initial reckless and vengeful exercises
of power, but it had to handle past histories with increased precaution, given the
politically sensitive nature of the subject
30
. We do not recognize all such novels as
novels of memory because many of them are absorbed by moral reflection of a
disingenuous nature, or by considerations about “power”, without giving much
thought to the processes of remembering and forgetting, or to the collective identity
that is formed through shared remembrance.
However, the Romanian novel of memory in communism grew in the shadow
of the “obsessive-decade” novels, especially since the 1950s presented the kind of
generational trauma needed for a memory boost to take place
31
. Paul Goma, a
champion of the opposition to the dictatorship, published in 1981, while in exile,
his novel Patimile după Pitești [The Passion of Pitești] illustrating the horrors of a
torture episode in Pitești political prison in the 1950s, by using split identities,
28
Eugen Negrici, Literatura română sub comunism [Romanian Literature under Communism], 3rd
revised and completed edition, Iași, Polirom, 2019, p. 266.
29
The phrase was borrowed from an essay by Marin Preda (“Obsedantul deceniu” [“The Obsessive
Decade”], Luceafărul, 1970, 23, pp. 1, 3), himself one of the main representatives of this local
subgenre.
30
Some of the most remarkable novels of the “obsessive decade” are, in almost all critical accounts,
Marin Preda’s Intrusul [The Intruder] (1969), Dumitru Radu Popescu’s F [F] (1969) and Vânătoare
regală [A Royal Hunt] (1973), Alexandru Ivasiuc’s Păsările [The Birds] (1970), Augustin Buzura’s
Fețele tăcerii [The Faces of Silence] (1974), Constantin Țoiu’s Galeria cu viță sălbatică [The Wild
Grapevine Gallery] (1976). But even authors obedient to the regime wrote “obsessive-decade” novels
in a complacent vein, adding some sort of love story background to a trip down memory lane made by
a former party activist: see Corneliu Leu’s Patriarhii [The Patriarchs] (1979), Corneliu Sturzu’s
Ianus [Janus] (1983), or Grigore Zanc’s Cădere liberă [Free Fall] (1976).
31
The novel of memory should also be distinguished from the psychological novel that happens to
focus on remembering. Examples are books written by minor authors, usually indexed by the DCRR
and DCRR 1990–2000 as “novels of affective memory”. They all lack the necessary preoccupation
with collective identity in our subgenre. This is the case with novels that present characters with some
kind of cognitive and neurological impairment: Anda Raicu, Fiul luminii [The Son of Light] (1983),
Diana Turconi, Legați-vă centurile de siguranță [Fasten Your Seatbelts] (1988), Traian Liviu
Birăescu, Pomul cunoașterii [The Tree of Knowledge] (1983), Florin Bănescu, Tangaj [Pitching]
(1980); or with sentimental novels that dwell on past events, for example Ștefan Damian, Pisica de
Eritreea [The Eritrean Cat] (1986) and Alex Rudeanu, Corabia de piatră [The Stone Boat] (1988).

ANDREEA MIRONESCU, DORIS MIRONESCU
106
playing with the narrative voice in a manner typical of the subgenre and professing
a durable commitment to memory: “memory, our mother and protector (as much as
she can), memory, our mother, our savior”
32
. A novel in essay form about the
artistic education of a young man in the 1950s is Norman Manea’s Anii de ucenicie
ai lui August Prostul [August the Clown’s Years of Apprenticeship] (1980), which
subversively mixes diary entries and paper clips from newspapers to render the
confrontation between individual formation and public lies. A masterpiece of the
subgenre is Gabriela Adameșteanu’s Dimineață pierdută [Wasted Morning]
(1984), a generational novel that connects the trauma of losing the first part of the
First World War by Romania in the autumn of 1916 and that of persecution in the
first decade of the communist regime, and makes the high-class memories of Ivona
Scarlat, filled with considerations on temporality and family life dysfunctions,
intersect dialogically with those of Vica Delcă, the stronger, funny and sturdy
working-class woman who comes to comfort her former employer. But we also
have to include here Sorin Titel’s Melancolie [Melancholy] (1988), the semi-
autobiographical coda to a great novelistic work dedicated to nostalgic family
memory, now focusing on the moral pain and confusion of a student from the
1950s, expelled from school for political reasons. And, of course, mention must be
made of Mircea Nedelciu’s Zmeura de câmpie [The Field Raspberry] (1988),
subtitled “a novel against memory”, theorizing the need to cut off roots and live in
the present, but making its heroes orphans with an interest in etymology, that is,
personally invested in searching the past to find out causes and sources for the
present-day situation.
Post-communism: Traumatic, (N)ostalgic, Agonistic
While novels of memory written before 1989 faced censorship and even
repression and therefore had to use complicated plot and contorted diegesis, after
the fall of communism such challenges disappeared. Still, such novels had to
compete with the ample “memory wave” that swept the 1990s, including mostly
memoirs by prominent victims of the communist regime giving testimony on
violence, torture and abuse at the hands of the state. At the same time, the muted
memory of the Holocaust came to life, especially the participation to the
extermination of Jews by the Romanian state throughout Ion Antonescu’s military
dictatorship (1940–1944). The co-presence of these two different slices of national
memory supplementary hindered the possibility of constructing a unified national
mythology of memory, so one of the main “memory battles” of the 1990s was
fought, as some could only see these memories in competition with each other.
This is why memory novels in post-communism had to adopt a hermeneutic,
analytical and comparative disposition, since the past at their disposal seemed more
32
Paul Goma, Patimile după Pitești [The Passion of Pitești], București, Cartea Românească, 1990, p. 5.

THE NOVEL OF MEMORY AS WORLD GENRE
107
complex than might have been assumed. As a result, by contrast to the Spanish
case, where the novel of memory has a well-delimited historical referent, the
Romanian novel of memory should not be restricted to the so-called novel of
communism.
In Table 1 we have distinguished between three categories of novels in post-
communism, namely traumatic memory novels, (n)ostalgic memory novels, and
agonistic memory novels.
Table 1. The Novel of memory in post-communist Romania. A very short list
TRAUMATIC
MEMORY NOVELS
(N)OSTALGIC
MEMORY NOVELS
AGONISTIC
MEMORY NOVELS
Teohar Mihadaș, Pe muntele Ebal
(1990)
Paul Goma, Din Calidor. O copilărie
basarabeană (1990)
Mircea Nedelciu, Zodia scafandrului
(2003)
Gabriel Chifu, Visul copilului care
pășește pe zăpadă fără să lase urme
(2004)
Doina Ruști, Fantoma din moară
(2008)
Varujan Vosganian, Cartea
șoaptelor (2009)
Alexandru Vlad, Ploile amare
(2011)
Florin Irimia, O fereastră întunecată
(2012)
Filip Florian, Toate bufnițele
(2012)
Ruxandra Cesereanu, Un singur cer
deasupra lor (2013)
Adrian Alui Gheorghe, Urma (2013)
Varujan Vosganian, Copiii
războiului (2016)
Nicolae Avram, Mame (2016)
Diana Adamek, Adio, Margot (2017)
Viorica Răduță, Orașul închis (2017)
Doina Jela, Efectul fluturelui (2018)
Lucia Dărămuș, Convoiul mieilor
(2018)
Liliana Corobca, Capătul drumului
(2018)
Andreea Răsuceanu, O formă de
viață necunoscută (2018)
Florina Ilis, Cartea numerilor (2018)
Cătălin Mihuleac, Deborah (2019)
Nora Iuga, Hipodrom (2019)
Ovidiu Verdeș, Muzici și faze (2000)
Ștefan Baștovoi, Iepurii nu mor
(2000)
Mircea Cărtărescu,
Orbitor II. Corpul (2002)
Filip și Matei Florian, Băiuțeii
(2006)
Iulian Ciocan, Înainte să moară
Brejnev (2007)
Dan Lungu, Sînt o babă comunistă!
(2007)
Radu Pavel Gheo, Noapte bună,
copii! (2010)
Doru Pop, O telenovelă socialistă
(2013)
Mara Wagner, În spatele blocului
(2017)
Alina Nelega, Ca și cum nimic nu s-
ar fi întâmplat (2019)
Diana Bădica, Părinți (2019)
Norman Manea, Întoarcerea
huliganului (2003)
Ioan T. Morar, Lindenfeld
(2005)
Filip Florian, Degete mici
(2005)
Gabriela Adameșteanu,
Întâlnirea (2007)
Norman Manea, Vizuina
(2009)
Lucian Dan Teodorovici,
Matei Brunul (2011)
Cătălin Mihuleac, America de
peste pogrom (2014)
Radu Pavel Gheo, Disco
Titanic (2016)
Daniel Vighi, Trilogia Corso
(2018)
Alexandru Potcoavă, Viața și
opiniile unui Halle (2019)
Lavinia Braniște, Sonia ridică
mâna (2019)
Simona Sora, Complezență.
Înălțarea la ortopedie. Musafir
pe viață (2020)

ANDREEA MIRONESCU, DORIS MIRONESCU
108
Some preliminary observations can be made on the novels short-listed above
and also on the three columns we have delineated in the frame of the subgenre. As
the table above shows at first sight, the three novelistic categories largely succeed
each other chronologically, and also on a generational basis, although, of course,
authors from different age cohorts are present in all three novelistic subgroups.
Before proceeding to a narrower presentation of the three novelistic branches, we
should emphasize that the various traits regarding the main theme, plot and
narrative mode we used to exemplify the range of the three categories are not
necessarily cumulative, nor limited to just one of the categories. Rather they
migrate for one subgroup of novels to another, are taken up critically, reinterpreted
and recycled intertextually. It is precisely for this reason that the demarcation lines
between the three subgroups are extremely thin, even blurry.
There is no surprise that the first category, traumatic memory novels, amasses a
number of novels equal to the other two subgroups (the (n)ostalgic and the
agonistic), since this sub-subgenre emerged first, in the early 1990s. Traumatic
memory novels usually refer to collective tragedies and focus not on the individual,
but on entire categories of victims of a dramatic situation. These novels highlight a
real event that they either narrate directly or indicate unmistakably by their
allegorical treatment. Many of them are anticommunist novels, either because of
the inevitable political positioning of the author-protagonist as victim of the
regime, or through the strong personal conviction of the monographer.
The severity of trauma requires commitment, so the testimonial quality of an
entire line of such novels is reflected by their autobiographical nature (Teohar
Mihadaș, On the Mountain of Ebal, and Paul Goma, The Calidor).
Next to testimonial novels, there are documentary novels, such as Ruxandra
Cesereanu’s A Single Sky above Them or Viorica Răduță’s The Imprisoned City,
but also Lucia Dărămuș’s The Lambs’ Convoy and Liliana Corobca’s The End of
the Journey. They imply the passing of a duty of memory onto the survivors or
next-generation descendants, which may be assumed by writers with a stronger
sense of historic responsibility.
Thirdly, there are allegorical novels such as Mircea Nedelciu’s The Sign of the
Diver, Alexandru Vlad’s The Bitter Rains, Florin Irimia’s A Dark Window, and
Varujan Vosganian’s Children of the War. Here, a collective trauma (the 1941 anti-
Semite pogroms, the birth of bastard children after the war, or the psychological
pressure of dealing with menacing figures of authority) is taken on by a
contemporary writer, who uses the hazy referentiality of allegory (outstanding
fantastic elements, unreliable narration) as a means of indicating the fictional
status, unmistakable given the distance in time.
Nicolae Avram’s Mamé has a special status, as it has a testimonial value,
justified by the author’s personal experience as a resident of the derelict,
overcrowded, abusive orphanages in the 1970s–1980s, and also an allegorical
profile, constructed through metaphor, poetic style, and temporal ambiguity. We
concluded that the allegorical component is more prominent, as it serves the

THE NOVEL OF MEMORY AS WORLD GENRE
109
function of exploring horror without exploiting sentiment, something that belongs
more to the province of the testimonial and documentary novels of trauma. A
particular line of traumatic memory novels deals with post-memory
33
, as trauma is
passed down in the family or inherited by means of voluntary affiliation.
Sometimes a contemporary writer would appropriate and rework an individual
or family trauma. This is what happens in Doina Ruști’s The Phantom in the Mill
or in Nora Iuga’s Hippodrome, but probably the most compelling case of memory
being assumed later in the line and responsibly conveyed by descendants is
Vosganian’s The Book of Whispers, which describes the Armenian genocide and
the plight of Armenians in the Diaspora, especially in communist Romania after
1945. The author makes use of a plethora of techniques, invoking personal
biography, commenting on photographs and, most of all, maintaining a dialogue
with the elders of the family whereby their memory is kept alive. The particularity
of the post-memory discourse is its fleeting quality, its lack of authority, supplanted
by an emphasis on senses, as well as documentary memory props, which
Vosganian provides abundantly. Also, the intersectionality of a collective trauma of
the magnitude of the Armenian genocide spans continents and contributes, in the
end, to a global reach of memory by means of an affiliative memory no longer
restricted to the national tribe
34
.
While traumatic memory novels were the first to spring up after 1989, often
through means of semi-autobiographic narratives by former victims of persecution,
the (n)ostalgic memory novels took longer to present themselves as a well-defined
category that requires attention. They are generally published after the year 2000
by a new generation of authors who spent their childhood and adolescence in late
communism, which is also their main thematic focus. By referring to the daily life
under communism of anonymous people, these authors seek to challenge the idea
that everything then was “tainted” and the lives of the commoners, impregnated as
they were by the ubiquity of communist symbols, needed increased political
scrutiny to reach deliverance. Indeed, this Romanian wave of rejection directed
against the anticommunist discourse of the 1990s was echoing a widespread feeling
in post-communist societies, canonized through a German portmanteau word:
“Ostalgie”, or the feeling of nostalgia toward the communist times (and, in
Germany, toward the former German Democratic Republic, “Ost Deutschland”),
when for many life was simpler than in the troublesome transition period. Taken up
in German novels such as Thomas Brussig’s On the Shorter End of Sun Avenue
(1999) or films like Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), (n)ostalgia – as
we decided to call it – was a daring aesthetic proposition, but also a critique of the
anticommunist discourse that was used to make dissenters from the triumphalist
33
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust,
New York, Columbia University Press, 2012, p. 3.
34
Andreea Mironescu, “Quiet Voices, Faded Photographs. Remembering the Armenian Genocide in
Varujan Vosganian’s ‘The Book of Whispers’”, Slovo, 29, 2017, 2, pp. 20-39.

ANDREEA MIRONESCU, DORIS MIRONESCU
110
discourse of free-market capitalism feel guilty for clinging to a condemned past.
But the growing mass of dissenters, and probably also the quality of the artistic
reflection on the phenomenon in these years led to the conceptualization of “post-
communist nostalgia” as the reverse of post-communist trauma, although in some
of the novels discussed above nostalgia and trauma are strictly imbricated
35
.
It is noteworthy that (n)ostalgic memory novels are experiential in nature and
that they often assume an auto-fictional character or otherwise play with the limits
of (auto)biographical discourse, as it happens with Radu Pavel Gheo’s Good Night,
Children!. For most of the novels in this category, humor is the guarantee of an
unprejudiced approach to the past, refusing to forge idols from figures of memory,
no matter how impressive these are. One recurring device is the unreliable narrator,
usually a child positioned as the reflector of the story, which also helps the novel
acquire the inquisitive, fresh, ethical perspective of somebody who doesn’t
understand compromise. The naivety, the wide-eyed curiosity of the narrator is a
guarantee of sincerity and a strong comic device in Ovidiu Verdeș’s Musics and
Antics, Filip and Matei Florian’s The Baiut Alley Lads, or Mara Wagner’s Behind
the Apartment Building. Probably the key (n)ostalgic memory novel in Romania is
Dan Lungu’s I’m an Old Communist Biddie!, based on the real life story of a
working woman who remembers her youth in the 1970s and 1980s. Through the
figure of Emilia Apostoaie, the author pleads for the necessity to illustrate the
plight of unhappy characters that were refused even the status of victims at a time
so enthusiastic for change that it ignored all those left behind.
While humor is characteristic for many of the artistic products included in this
novelistic subgroup, there is also a feeling of loss and pain in (n)ostalgia which
allows for a more introspective dimension, sometimes accommodating personal
trauma in political history, as in Alina Nelega’s As if Nothing Had Happened and
Diana Bădica’s Parents. In these novels, one may speak of an interpretative type of
memory that delivers not just the contents of remembrance, but also reflections on
false self-representations, on hidden personal motivations behind politically
influential collective representations and on the life-changing importance of the
peculiar, the quirky and the idiosyncratic. The feminine condition in a totalitarian
society which ignores its own misogyny is, because of that, even more
heartbreaking.
This introspective trend in (n)ostalgic memory novels may turn to the fantastic
in order to accommodate personal trauma by transferring it to a metaphysical level,
as in Mircea Cărtărescu’s The Body, the second volume of his acclaimed trilogy
Blinding. Cărtărescu’s trilogy mixes in almost equal proportion elements from all
three novelistic subgroups, but we chose for this article the volume which seemed
to us the most autobiographic. The Body is also the most anecdotal book of
35
Maria Todorova, “Introduction”, in Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille (eds.), Post-communist
Nostalgia, New York, Berghahn Books, 2010, pp. 1-5.

THE NOVEL OF MEMORY AS WORLD GENRE
111
Cărtărescu’s acclaimed trilogy, following a child-hero with his songs and games,
who unassumingly acquires the power to conjure up protective forces that
confound the secret police, thereby prompting a mythological interpretation of
history.
Traumatic and (n)ostalgic memory novels set the tone for a lively memory
landscape in Romania in the 1990s and 2000s, with anticommunism and nostalgia
keeping each other in check. However, starting with the first half of the first decade
of the 21st century, a new tone of memory and a new type of novel emerged. We
call this the agonistic memory novel, following Hans Lauge Hansen’s research on
the Spanish memory novel in the 21st century. Hansen invokes the 2013 work of
the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe on social identity. The latter tries to
go beyond the aspirations nourished by European Union bureaucrats for a utopian
equilibrium and maybe even synergy between adversarial memories on the
continent. Instead, what she promotes is the idea of a rational contest conducted
through “agonism”, or respectful disagreement, and a will to cohabit the same
political space, since common identities are inevitably constructed with an “other”
in mind
36
.
Agonism might well be the political call of a (new) generation, and indeed
some writers we are locating in this category are clinging to a vision of the present
at the edge of time. For them, getting the past straight is not a matter of rightly
constructing a common identity of all parties, something they come to believe is
unachievable. As a result, they refrain from participating in memory battles, which
they prefer to evade by highlighting the manipulative outlook and the constructed
character of memory. Essentially, they embrace the perspective of an impassioned
witness of history, a seasoned traveller through diverse cultures or a latecomer to a
debate already consummated, that (s)he shares almost nothing with ideologically,
and this perspective serves the agonistic position well. Several narrative modes and
devices are helpful for expressing this stance toward the available past(s).
First, the satirical mode must be considered one of the first signs of the coming
of the agonistic age. Writers around 2005 started using humor to highlight the
frailty and mystifying nature of collective memory, stemming as it does from a
plurality of opposing group remembrances. Of course, there exists a strong satiric
vibe in other memory novels from postcommunism, particularly those in the
(n)ostalgic camp, which feel obliged to contest narrations of the immediate past by
harnessing the subversive force of humor. But satirical agonistic novels are usually
more far-reaching in their retrospective look, and their satire foreshadows a distrust
of history across several historical ages, and even a satirical outlook on history as a
whole. Filip Florian, in his acclaimed Little Fingers, employs a mystery plot with
far-reaching historical implications, by conjuring around a trove of unidentified
36
Hans Lauge Hansen, “Modes of Remembering in the Contemporary Spanish Novel”, Orbis
Litterarum, 71, 2016, 4, pp. 274-275.

ANDREEA MIRONESCU, DORIS MIRONESCU
112
bones many opposing interested parties: former communists, anticommunist
activists, religious hierarchs, who want to see it confirm their identity myths. But
they are all frustrated in their expectations, and this gives the narrator – an
archeologist, therefore a professional of hermeneutics and “depth” – the
satisfaction to celebrate his independence of thought, which guarantees his lucidity.
Another novelist, Alexandru Potcoavă, in Life and Opinions of a Certain Halle,
ventures into the much-disputed memory of the interwar period in the Banat region
to see different recollections of different people with multiple ethnic backgrounds
fail at the precise moment when they fall back on nationalistic mythologies.
Another perspective into an agonistic kind of memory is reached by means of
dialogism. Some novelists, among them Gabriela Adameșteanu, Norman Manea,
and Gheo, are in the habit of letting past traumas mirror each other, and thus
measure up their relative amplitude. The goal of such dialogic memory mirrors is
not a competition, but a study in transnational, often transcontinental solidarity.
Their “multidirectional”
37
novels express an appetite for memory spanning a
plurality of cultures, either in the course of one character’s life (as in Manea’s The
Lair) or in people with different memory legacies intersecting, making them
contextualize their own trauma (for instance, in Adameșteanu’s The Encounter).
Finally, there is a strong and recent direction of agonistic memory novels that
are exposing a post-ideological stance. Novels such as Sonia Raises Her Hand by
Lavinia Braniște or Complacency by Simona Sora express a distrust of both
anticommunist memory and the ironical memory of the (n)ostalgics. They
cautiously inspect the claims to truth of both parties and in the end reclaim the right
to memory of more recent things or of personal pasts that have no connection with
the formats of the previous memory modes. They flaunt a rejection of the ideology
of memory itself, in that they affect disinterest toward the way in which memory
constructs community, while they are actually contesting the contents, not the
circuits of memory.
To Conclude: Future Perspectives
Our article is the first attempt to map the novel of memory both as a world
genre and as a Romanian subgenre, drawing consistently on the theoretical grounds
already established for the Spanish case. Although we worked on a rather limited
list consisting of fifty memory novels published in the Romanian areal both before
and after the fall of communism, we maintain that the three categories we
delineated may very well function in other literatures, especially in post-communist
cultures. Another important feature of this subgenre in its Romanian version is its
strong transnational potential. While most critics and the main archives, among
37
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
Decolonization, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 11.

THE NOVEL OF MEMORY AS WORLD GENRE
113
which DCRR and DCRR 1990–2000, restrict their area of investigation to novels
published in the national areal or in Romanian, the novel of memory challenges
this methodology. On the one hand, that is because many memoirs or memory
novels by Romanian authors were first published abroad, in foreign translation
(most notoriously those of Paul Goma). On the other hand, because important
authors born in Romania and writing in languages other than Romanian, such as
Aglaja Veteranyi in Warum das Kind in der Polenta kocht [Why Is the Child
Cooking in the Polenta] (1999), Andrei Codrescu in Messiah (1999), György
Dragomán in A fehér király [The White King] (2005), and Herta Müller in
Atemshaukel [The Hunger Angel] (2009), address topics like local communism, the
Holocaust, postwar deportations to the Soviet Union and so on, and in this way
participate in the same “Romanian” memory continuum. In their novels one finds
the same historical mix filtered by the same critical and self-critical memory, with
temporal and narrative identity games. This goes to show that the novel of memory
subgenre goes beyond the linguistic margins of a particular literature,
demonstrating the fluidity and permeability of these borders.
In an article about memory, it might be interesting to wonder what the future
might hold in store for the subgenre we discussed. A phenomenon that can already
be noticed is the shrinking of the testimonial variety of the traumatic novel, caused
by the authors’ passing, and the growth of the novel of post-memory. The
(n)ostalgic novel of memory is also a generational novel and it is only sensible that
it too, in time, will wither. Given that it seems to be so much connected to a
specific generation whose members were the last to experience childhood under
communism, the emergence of newer generations born after communism, for
whom that period is history, and not a part of their affective memory, post-
communist (n)ostalgia will probably lose its literary attractiveness. Finally, we
predict that agonistic memory novels will gain momentum in the next decade,
provided that other memory waves wash over them and make them history.
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THE NOVEL OF MEMORY AS WORLD GENRE. EXPLORING THE
ROMANIAN CASE
(Abstract)
In the last four decades, the novel of memory has gained momentum on the world scene, taking
advantage of the collapse of colonial and/ or dictatorial regimes around the globe. Romania was not
an exception, so after the fall of Communism in 1989, and more prominently at the beginning of the
new millennium, this subgenre blossomed. Based on quantitative and qualitative research of a
selection of fifty novels published in the Romanian space both before and after the fall of the
communist regime, this article is the first attempt to map the Romanian novel of memory from a
genre-based perspective. Our approach follows the evolution of the novel of memory in the course of
four decades, from a thematic, formal, and generational perspective. Relying on these operators, as
well as on the culturalist approach to literature in memory studies, we distinguish between a
traumatic, a (n)ostalgic and an agonistic novel of memory.
Keywords: novel of memory, world genre, national subgenres, traumatic memory, (n)ostalgia.
ROMANUL MEMORIEI CA GEN MONDIAL. O EXPLORARE A
CAZULUI ROMÂNESC
(Rezumat)
În ultimele patru decenii, romanul memoriei s-a impus pe scena globală, în parte și datorită căderii
unor regimuri politice coloniale și/sau dictatoriale. România nu reprezintă o excepție în acest
scenariu, prin urmare, după prăbușirea comunismului în 1989, dar în special odată cu debutul noului
mileniu, acest subgen a erupt în arena publică. Având la bază o analiză cantitativă și calitativă pe
marginea unei selecții de 50 de romane publicate în spațiul românesc atât înainte, cât și după
înlăturarea regimului comunist, acest articol reprezintă o primă încercare de a cartografia romanul
memoriei dintr-o perspectivă centrată pe genul literar. Abordarea noastră urmărește evoluția
romanului memoriei pe parcursul a patru decenii, sub aspect tematic, formal și generațional. Îmbinând
acești operatori cu abordarea culturalistă a literaturii din câmpul studiilor despre memorie, propunem
trei categorii în interiorul subgenului: romanul memoriei traumatice, romanul memoriei (n)ostalgice și
cel al memoriei agonistice.
Cuvinte-cheie: romanul memoriei, gen literar mondial, subgen national, memorie traumatică,
(n)ostalgie.